Whenever anyone in your community engages with your leisure organisation, their experience needs to be as positive and as convenient as possible if you want them to return.  

If they face any barriers – like confusing messaging, unclear calls to action or technical glitches – they’ll turn away. Any friction will prevent that positive interaction and engagement with your leisure facilities.  

That’s why you need to focus on creating a frictionless experience for your members at every stage of their journey with your organisation.  

From the moment they first hear of you, right through their continued, hopefully lifelong membership, you need to follow these six steps to a smooth, seamless experience:  

1. Promote A Consistent Offer  

Before you do anything else, you need to make sure your offer – and all the benefits your organisation delivers to your community – is promoted clearly and consistently in all your marketing.  

Your messaging – all your adverts and social media posts – should be clear and simple. Concise and consistent. You want every prospect to see the same key benefits, the same great features at every touchpoint, so they’re continually reiterated.  

Try and create a single, clear, benefit-driven call to action across every piece of promotional content. One that consistently encourages your prospects and everyone in your community to find out more about your leisure centres.  

2. Train Your Team

Next, you’ll need to make sure your team is fully up to speed on what that offer is. They should know your key messaging, your key USPs and the benefit-driven call to action you use in your marketing like the back of their hand, so they can mirror it when talking with new visitors, members and customers.                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Support your team with regular advice and training sessions that help them understand your messaging and promote your leisure facilities consistently and effectively.  

You might also want to give them tools that can help them speed up and streamline new member sign-ups, so they’re eliminating any friction when prospects want to find out more. With less time spent on admin, your team has more time to provide a personal experience.  

3. Deploy Self-Service Technology

Those software and technology tools that support your team also make a real difference to your membership journey. The right self-service technology, for example, can eliminate common friction points.

A self-service kiosk at reception can help visitors sign up immediately for a new membership without having to wait at reception. And software like Legend that lets members manage their own payment details online or on an app means they don’t have to worry about speaking to someone at your leisure centre.  

Deploying self-service technology across your leisure centres also eliminates paperwork and synchronises sign-up processes across multiple sites. They both cause more friction in your membership journey, where there’s inconsistencies or time wasted chasing documents.  

4. Automate Your Onboarding Process

When your members have signed up smoothly, you’ll want to focus on engaging them effectively to make sure they get the most out of your facilities. That means building an efficient, frictionless onboarding process.  

Set up an automated sequence of email and text messages to guide members through their first visits. You could detail key facilities, information on how to book classes, advice on managing their memberships and other recommendations on how to get the most value from your leisure centre.  

If you can automate and personalise your onboarding process, with suggestions on classes and equipment based on member preferences, you’ll further improve their experience.

5. Engage Your Members Regularly  

A frictionless membership journey extends well beyond your new members, so make sure you don’t neglect all your existing ones. You’ll want to support their journey after their onboarding process, offering help and advice as often as possible.  

There are several ways you can keep existing members engaged:  

• Send regular emails and texts to promote new and existing facilities. Your leisure management software should make this simple and straightforward.  

• Use membership and access data to tailor recommendations. Again, software like Legend can automate and streamline this process to personalise your communications with your members.  

• Reward loyalty with incentives. Show your members you value their custom by tracking their usage/membership history and recognising key milestones – like anniversaries or 1,000 visits reached. This will encourage them to keep returning too.  

6. Gather Feedback And Reviews From Your Members

Lastly, to maintain an effective, frictionless membership journey, you need to consistently check it. You’ll want to see what’s working and what isn’t, and identify areas you can improve.  

Reviewing your engagement metrics is important, but you should also get real feedback from your members. You could: 

• Survey them after they sign up to ask what they liked and didn’t like  
• Request reviews after they’ve been using your facilities for a few months  

Both will give you different insight and opinions into members’ experience.  

Use that feedback to identify any common themes or issues raised and update your journey accordingly to eliminate any potential friction.  

Focus On The Experience Of Your Customers At Every Step 

The key to a frictionless membership journey is to focus on the experience of your customers at every step.  

Their experience is a key indicator of your success, as you’ll see in our latest guide: How To Measure The Success of Your Leisure Operations in 2023.

Keep track of that experience, and you’ll see where any friction arises, so you can address it quickly.  

The right software can help you eliminate friction in your membership journey and measure your members’ experiences, so you can be sure your leisure organisation is on the path to success. Software like Legend.